(An obituary circulated world-wide by Toyin Falola. Text originally composed in French by Bernard Schlemmer and translated to English by Edgard Sankara of La Grange College.)

Claude Meillassoux passed away. He leaves in the field of Anthropology and in the Social Sciences many colleagues who feel left out today as if his orphans--paradoxically enough, because Meillassoux never considered himself a spiritual father to no one.

A thunder clap in a serene sky

His name will remain forever associated, in our intellectual history, with the break of the paradigm (in the sense of T. Khun's analysis) with the publication of his founding article "Essai d'interprétation du phénomène économique dans les sociétés traditionnelles d'autosubsistance " (Cahiers d'études africaines, 1960, 4: 38-67). Today, Roland Waast still remembers when, as a young student, as he was sitting at the terrace of the Café La Sorbonne, the meeting spot of the Sociology students, he saw Raymond Jamous coming, feverishly brandishing an issue of the Cahiers, and shouting "I have just discovered the article that will change the face of Anthropology!" Suddenly it was revealed to us that the indigenous societies studied by Anthropology-those that could not for some reasons be called differently other than by defect or in opposition to our Western society-were like any human society, forced to produce economic goods, and to produce them, even before as exchange them; they were forced to enter the chain of production before they could function on any other level. It is this article, quickly followed by Meillassoux's masterly thesis on L'anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d'Ivoire (Mouton, 1964) which opened the way in France to the sudden rise of research in economic Anthropology, and well beyond. To quote only the pioneers, young scholars of his generation or hardly his juniors, and who began their work during the 1960's, the names of Pierre Bonnafe, Jean Copans, Jacques Dupre, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Emmanuel Terray are only a few, to which should be added, in the same generation but for other disciplines, those of economists such as Samir Amin, or Benjamin Coriat, or the philosopher Etienne Balibar, the historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovich, the demographers Francis Gendreau or Jacques Veron-just to name a few-to speak here only about those who share the Meillassoux's perspective or who acknowledge him as influence and model for their own work.

Rapidly, the large majority of the French Anthropologists became more or less influenced by the work of Claude Meillassoux to the point that economic Anthropology would dominate French Academia to the exception of Structural Anthropology, during all that decade at least. It is obviously impossible to quote here all those who followed that trend, not even those who claimed or still claim Meillassoux's influence. His influence will later extend largely out of the small circle of the Francophones: let us recall that one of his key works (Femmes, greniers et capitaux)(1975, Maspero) was translated into no less than six languages because this young man's perspective opened new windows singularly inside Anthropology itself, and among the various disciplines of social sciences, particularly in the Marxist intellectual community. The debate suddenly ceased to stagnate over the extension of the "Asian mode of production" or the relevance of the concept of infra and superstructure applied to pre-capitalists societies, to open the way to a general reflection on the economic and social formations historically constructed, in any place or at any historical period of human society-thus accomplishing the real ambition of historical materialism.

Where did the young researcher who showed up in the university field with such a glorious feat get such an audacity? It is certainly due to the fact that he had not followed a classical formation but that, coming from a rich bourgeois industrial family of Northern France, with a complete liberal education as an economist in the United States, he had begun his professional life at the heart of the capitalist system, which he thus knew from the inside and whose practices and uses convinced him quickly that he could never make a career there; and quite to the contrary, which he would devote his intelligence to fight! That is how he trained himself in Anthropology, well far away from the dominant currents of his time: French Structuralism or Anglo-Saxon Functionalism; fortunately enough, he then found in George Balandier a community of language and an eager listener with whom he shares a common understanding.

The "Meillassoux seminar" of La Rue Tournon

With his reputation established, he continued from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s his role as an innovator, a catalyst, by directing a seminar, of which most participants could hardly remember the exact theme, because for everyone, it was "The Meillassoux seminar." There met, well beyond the Anthropologists strictly speaking, all those who intended to take part, intellectually, in the emancipation movement and national liberation, and who were interested in the basic challenges that this issue posed: how to analyze the articulation between traditional economies and the capitalist economy, the lineage-based societies and the construction of nation-states, neocolonialism and imperialism, development and underdevelopment, etc? Naturally, the debates were heated and impassioned. One remembers the "seminar" as a place where intellectual research and militant passion fed mutually, where the controversies were built but sometimes also where the anathemas were decided, where engagement in the theoretical debate was judged with the ell of political engagement, where true dialectics of the logos and praxis worked.

Claude Meillassoux was then fully recognized for his human qualities in addition to his intellectual qualities. His ability to listen, his care for others, his cordial fraternity, his absolute contempt for any hierarchy, any position of status, titles and positions, as well as his radical impermeability to the dominant thoughts, accepted ideas, and poor reasoning, made him an organizer recognized, appreciated, respected and even liked, in spite of the promptness of criticisms which he did not fail to make when he expressed his dissension. This seminar will not be a place for mere speech, as useful as it could be. Bringing together scholars from various horizons and disciplines, the seminar was the place where several collective works of importance were produced, such as L'évolution du commerce africain depuis le XIXee siècle en Afrique de l'Ouest, 1971, Oxford University Press, or L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Maspero, 1975) and, especially, Qui se nourrit de la famine en Afrique? (Maspero, 1974).

A committed thought

Indeed, that last book illustrates particularly well the Claude Meillassoux way, which consists in embracing in the same movement scientific and militant responsibilities, academic research and political engagement written in a state of emergency by the Africanist scholars mobilized by Claude and who refused to see, in the consequences of the drought-stricken Sahel the only effects of a natural fate. The book shows quite to the contrary that one could read in that the expected outcomes of a policy of economic domination directing the main part of the productive activities of these countries towards the only combined interests of the rich countries, the greedy multinationals and the corrupt national elites. The work, precursor of an ecological analysis which, today, keeps its strength but does not astonish any longer, was at the time sufficiently disturbing, had sufficient impact and echo, not only on the circle of Africanist scholars or Anthropologists, but beyond even on the researchers in Social Sciences, reaching a part of the public opinion, to the point that the scientific institutions will keep on watch- and will make it obvious - contributors of the book and those that indulge in frequent reference to it, going as far as making impossible or difficult for them to conduct field work. This way of combining academic production and involvement in contemporary events, intellectual responsibility and militancy, was illustrated by the collective effort around that book, only manifest on exceptional circumstances, when collaborative thought and effort appear to be the logical choice; there, the militant voice of the scholar is called for in the civic debate, because she shares a certain responsibility in holding a particular knowledge. With Claude Meillassoux, this involvement was permanent. The bibliography below shows well enough the extent of his range of interests, where it is difficult to figure out whether the theoretical questioning rose from political engagement or whether the opposite step prevailed. One recall here how much his analyses in economic Anthropology will feed his accurate critique of the world's economic evolutions and the exacerbation of the hierarchy of domination (There is neither other-worldliness today or Manicheism in his vision of the "traditional" societies: it is even him, on the contrary, who was the first to theorize the hierarchy of domination existing within those rural societies!). And from then on, while many of his articles dealt directly with social questions apparently remote from the African terrain, they derived in fact from his broad scientific approach and which he used to fight any injustice in any part of the world. Paradoxically, it is his political engagement that will awake his scholarly interest in Southern Africa, a source of so much fundamental work. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch writes to me on this subject: "I remember seeing him on his return from South Africa, and he said to me: "I could not agree to go to that country (then under Apartheid) only on condition that I should return with a political testimony from there." He was still one of the very first scholars to bring the concerns of South Africa to French public opinion!". From that field trip he wrote "Les derniers Blancs : le modèle sud-africain (Maspero, 1979), not without having more modestly contributed to a collective work openly militant, L'Afrique australe, par rapport à la colonisation et aux travailleurs africains (in UGTSF, ed. ? Notre Afrique, Maspero 1978, pp. 18-32), which was well in his style.

At the margin of the disciplines

That militant open-mindedness, Meillassoux will illustrate it again in the last twenty years in challenging the entire scientific community around a collective and interested effort by organizing several conferences with a group of colleagues of various disciplines; he requested, very consciously, that the conference themes be at the interface of the various disciplines, so as to allow each field researcher who faces problems on the field to express their concern in an open forum. Very carefully prepared by a small group which was constituted first as an organizing Committee, then as a Publishing Committee, each one of these three conferences has been for many scholars, who repeatedly remind us of it, one important moment in their intellectual progression. The first conference, Terrains et perspectives (Orstom, 1987), dealt with the responsibility for scholars in Social Sciences confronted with the transformations of rural societies in the Third World and with the policies and the ideologies of development. He wrote the conclusion, showing how "the peasants, who use the land to their exclusive benefit, are considered from the point of view of a capitalist economy, parasites" (p. 443). The second conference, Le Spectre de Malthus, (Orstom - EDI - Ceped, 1991), decompartmentalized a debate concerning each field researcher, but that remained confined in the only conferences for demographers: questions of underdevelopment and the food dependency of Third World countries in a context too quickly analyzed as "overpopulation." In an introductory theoretical chapter, Claude Meillassoux warns us that "this population is today in the situation of a relative overpopulation. The problem, for the capitalist economy which created it, is to make it disappear in order not to have it as an overload "(p. 31). The third one finally, L'enfant exploité (Karthala, 1996) was around a problem strikingly overlooked and to which nobody (Alain Morice is the only notable exception) was interested, whereas our awareness of the issue could inevitably challenge our various disciplinary approaches, and which forces us to renew our perspective, so long as we look at reality from their point of view: children forced into hard labor. There again, it is Claude who wrote the conclusion, underlining the paradox of "the incongruity of child labor. How such physically weak human beings, without any training, described as turbulent and inattentive, with a so-called narrow understanding, are likely to be preferred as workers over qualified and responsible adults? This extraordinary paradox rises from another: the well being of the individuals is not the first concern of a capitalist economic system. Quite to the contrary, it is human beings who have to adapt to the realities of a competing economy and that are affected, if not trapped, between the costs of goods and the prices of a fluctuating economic market.

What characterizes to me, and most significantly, the Claude Meillassoux way, is the permanent movement back and forth between intellectual and militant engagements. Even his methodology refuses to consider any society, any social phenomenon, as analyzable in an autonomous and isolated way, and out of context. His major contention was that the same systems of domination and exchange are at work in any human activity and in all human societies. His contention still challenges us and keeps us alert: It is hard for us to imagine today, how we will preserve this spirit of vigilance, now that he is not here to vigorously maintain alive that spirit of controversy which is its major prerequisite.

Bernard Schlemmer, with the authorization of the Editions Karthala are about to publish two books collecting untraceable or unpublished texts by Claude Meillassoux. We give below a copy of the bibliography that he himself had established at the time of the publication of Terrains et engagements de Claude Meillassoux (Karthala, 1998), a tribute to his work.